Antelope Canyon

For more of the stories behind these pictures, please see my previous entry: Too Hot to Blog, Part 2.

These are pictures from lower Antelope Canyon. The entrance to the canyon is an unassuming narrow crack in the ground that would be easy to ignore, but once we squeezed through, there were stairs to help us negotiate the steep parts.

Upper Antelope Canyon is apparently more popular, and this time of year, it's described as a human conveyor belt. Since I had a photographer's pass and didn't have to keep up with the tour, I got to enjoy a bit of solitude as my fellow photographers and I spread out through the quarter-mile long canyon. The experience was absolutely magical. Because of the angles of the canyon walls, beams of light reach the floor of the canyon at certain times of day in the upper canyon, but not the lower canyon. Since it was cloudy the day we visited, this wasn't an issue.

The solitude was broken briefly when a group of Japanese tourists hurried by, giggling and snapping pictures literally on the run. I can imagine that their experience of those few minutes in the canyon was not very similar to mine.

The mood was heightened by the music that our guide played on his flute.

I can't wait to go back and see the upper canyon and it's sun beams, but I'll try to do that in the off season.

For more of my pictures from Antelope Canyon, see my other blog.